A tremendous variety of methods have been proposed and implemented to provide security and anonymity for communications over the Internet. The variety stems, in part, from the different needs of different Internet users. A basic heuristic framework to aid in discussing these different security techniques is illustrated in FIG. 1. Two terminals, an originating terminal 100 and a destination terminal 110 are in communication over the Internet. It is desired for the communications to be secure, that is, immune to eavesdropping. For example, terminal 100 may transmit secret information to terminal 110 over the Internet 107. Also, it may be desired to prevent an eavesdropper from discovering that terminal 100 is in communication with terminal 110. For example, if terminal 100 is a user and terminal 110 hosts a web site, terminal 100's user may not want anyone in the intervening networks to know what web sites he is “visiting.” Anonymity would thus be an issue, for example, for companies that want to keep their market research interests private and thus would prefer to prevent outsiders from knowing which websites or other Internet resources they are “visiting.” These two security issues may be called data security and anonymity, respectively.
Data security is usually tackled using some form of data encryption. An encryption key 48 is known at both the originating and terminating terminals 100 and 110. The keys may be private and public at the originating and destination terminals 100 and 110, respectively or they may be symmetrical keys (the same key is used by both parties to encrypt and decrypt). Many encryption methods are known and usable in this context.
To hide traffic from a local administrator or ISP, a user can employ a local proxy server in communicating over an encrypted channel with an outside proxy such that the local administrator or ISP only sees the encrypted traffic. Proxy servers prevent destination servers from determining the identities of the originating clients. This system employs an intermediate server interposed between client and destination server. The destination server sees only the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the proxy server and not the originating client. The target server only sees the address of the outside proxy. This scheme relies on a trusted outside proxy server. Also, proxy schemes are vulnerable to traffic analysis methods of determining identities of transmitters and receivers. Another important limitation of proxy servers is that the server knows the identities of both calling and called parties. In many instances, an originating terminal, such as terminal A, would prefer to keep its identity concealed from the proxy, for example, if the proxy server is provided by an Internet service provider (ISP).
To defeat traffic analysis, a scheme called Chaum's mixes employs a proxy server that transmits and receives fixed length messages, including dummy messages. Multiple originating terminals are connected through a mix (a server) to multiple target servers. It is difficult to tell which of the originating terminals are communicating to which of the connected target servers, and the dummy messages confuse eavesdroppers' efforts to detect communicating pairs by analyzing traffic. A drawback is that there is a risk that the mix server could be compromised. One way to deal with this risk is to spread the trust among multiple mixes. If one mix is compromised, the identities of the originating and target terminals may remain concealed. This strategy requires a number of alternative mixes so that the intermediate servers interposed between the originating and target terminals are not determinable except by compromising more than one mix. The strategy wraps the message with multiple layers of encrypted addresses. The first mix in a sequence can decrypt only the outer layer of the message to reveal the next destination mix in sequence. The second mix can decrypt the message to reveal the next mix and so on. The target server receives the message and, optionally, a multi-layer encrypted payload containing return information to send data back in the same fashion. The only way to defeat such a mix scheme is to collude among mixes. If the packets are all fixed-length and intermixed with dummy packets, there is no way to do any kind of traffic analysis.
Still another anonymity technique, called ‘crowds,’ protects the identity of the originating terminal from the intermediate proxies by providing that originating terminals belong to groups of proxies called crowds. The crowd proxies are interposed between originating and target terminals. Each proxy through which the message is sent is randomly chosen by an upstream proxy. Each intermediate proxy can send the message either to another randomly chosen proxy in the “crowd” or to the destination. Thus, even crowd members cannot determine if a preceding proxy is the originator of the message or if it was simply passed from another proxy.
ZKS (Zero-Knowledge Systems) Anonymous IP Protocol allows users to select up to any of five different pseudonyms, while desktop software encrypts outgoing traffic and wraps it in User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packets. The first server in a 2+-hop system gets the UDP packets, strips off one layer of encryption to add another, then sends the traffic to the next server, which strips off yet another layer of encryption and adds a new one. The user is permitted to control the number of hops. At the final server, traffic is decrypted with an untraceable IP address. The technique is called onion-routing. This method can be defeated using traffic analysis. For a simple example, bursts of packets from a user during low-duty periods can reveal the identities of sender and receiver.
Firewalls attempt to protect LANs from unauthorized access and hostile exploitation or damage to computers connected to the LAN. Firewalls provide a server through which all access to the LAN must pass. Firewalls are centralized systems that require administrative overhead to maintain. They can be compromised by virtual-machine applications (“applets”). They instill a false sense of security that leads to security breaches for example by users sending sensitive information to servers outside the firewall or encouraging use of modems to sidestep the firewall security. Firewalls are not useful for distributed systems such as business travelers, extranets, small teams, etc.